Questions for Lukas

[MikeM]

Hi Lukas!

Some questions for you!

How did the art direction and visual feel develop for J.U.L.I.A.? Did you have particular inspirations or ideas going into the project?
Do you and Jan collaborate on the artistic look of the game, or does he mostly give you free reign?
There's a common saying about artists that a given piece of art is never really "finished", but rather "abandoned". Do you ever struggle with finding the line of "good enough" for versus taking a particular scene or animation to the best it can be?

[LukasMedek]

Hi Mike and sorry for late reply.

Well, because of fact that we have restarted J.U.L.I.A. development about three times, the visuals change a lot and you would not recognize the finished game in the very first visuals we did. Later, when we knew exactly which way we want to J.U.L.I.A. looks like, I took an inspiration from many sources. For the ship, I have installed old Freespace game and took screenshots from human ships and motherships, because I really liked the designs of it. For Mobot, the inspiration went obviously from Mechs and Japanese two-legged robots and the environment from various planetary screenshots and photos all around the world. Altough I took inspiration from many sci-fi sources (sometimes very unbelievable), we wanna keep things and especially technical designs in believable manner. So you can't see any teleport or plasma guns in J.U.L.I.A. for example

Jan gave me some rough and basic ideas how he imagined the world we were building, but all the designs and art was my part of the game

For your last question: Yes you're right I'm never really satisfied with my work. It is mostly because I have not enough time to improve things I would like, especially in pre-rendered backgrounds and animations (as you may know, we are only two in the team and we dont have money to buy a renderfarm ) There are many things I would like to improve in enhanced edition and it is the great opportunity to do it, especially when there is a time distance between the development and I see a lot of things I have missed before (and of course a bit better skills ). After the EE, I hope I will be really proud of our re-finished game

[MikeM]

Freespace was amazing.

You mentioned in another thread here that you're looking forward to doing some full 3D game art. Do you feel like working in 2D and 2.5D has limited you creatively?

[neon]

Oh Mike, now I have the connection to who you are Totally missed that.

[LukasMedek]

@MikeM - It is not case of some creative boundaries for me, (of course you can render a much better looking images and animations than in real -time CG -at least nowadays, new engines are becoming really close to renders in my opinion) but in the way of the workflow. I feel much more comfortable when I can see the result in the same moment I make a change and I do not have to wait minutes for render test, than change it again, hit render button, wait again... Next thing is that you can make much more animations in more easy way and with less performance cost, particle systems, easy camera changes and effects etc. Maybe it doesn't seem from the game, but we have totally exhausted WME engine in its possibilities with J.U.L.I.A. and although there aren't many things happening in the scenes, it really costs a lot of memory.
I also really like the highpoly -> lowpoly way of work in all aspects of modeling, texturing and animations and I have really quickly got used to it during the development of Vampires!

[MikeM]

Oh Mike, now I have the connection to who you are Totally missed that.

You and I live with the curse of having a very common name. I never know whether to use my first name, full name, or a handle/screenname on forums anymore.

I also really like the highpoly -> lowpoly way of work in all aspects of modeling, texturing and animations and I have really quickly got used to it during the development of Vampires!

Vampires! looks like it was just the right size for a project to start developing a new pipeline and try out some new ideas. Kudos to you guys for getting that done and out there so quickly! I'm looking forward to seeing more of your work in J.U.L.I.A EE. The art samples shown so far look really good. Thanks for answering my questions!